Hello from Oz – where the last couple of weeks have seen a bit of a break in our luck.
About a month ago, we finally swallowed hard and put our cherished bit of land on the market. We finally faced the fact we didn’t’ have enough money to build, and we were just wasting money keeping the loan from our rental house escapade to build a house we would never be able to realise.
It was a really tough call to make. But we’d been waiting for our luck to give for such a long time, and eventually you just have to face these things. We kissed our dream goodbye and set our chins to the future.
On shaky advice from the real estate agents we put it on at $350k, which is $115k more than we paid for it 3 years ago. Ambitious, but worth a shot we thought.
However, since the real estate agents want nearly $11k just to sell it, we decided to list it via a lo-cost agency that simply lists it on the two largest real estate sales web sites, We haven’t had even a sniff.
About three weeks ago Daile landed work with a large non profit organisation, and her role is to be a counsellor to young kids who have been abused and have dropped out of the normal catch points such as foster carers and normal schools. It’s not quite the kind of work that she wants, but its going in the right direction.
During that week, she came across a job, on a site that we don’t normally look on, that she thought might be worth me having a stab at. I phoned them up to find out more, they said I should send in my CV. I said, I’m not really interested in sending you my CV until I know more about the job, as I’d like to tailor it to fit. They told me more about the job. I tailored my CV…and then they invited me to interview. I had two and a half interviews and was offered the job! It’s a project manager role at this company: http://www.roaminteractive.com/ and it’s six minutes drive from where we live! Not brilliant money, but interesting and challenging work, plus there’s a lot of room for making myself hard to live without….
Then we got a call from a mate on a street opposite our land, to tell us that a house was going for sale that was right for us. There have been almost no moves off that street for 10 years. We went straight over and agreed. We decided to make an offer the next day, but we were beaten to it. Then, funny thing, the owners of the house opposite them heard that we’d been interested and said they’d be interested in selling. Their house was even better, being the only one on the street that had a pool, tree top views to beautiful sunrises from the decks, and a bit of room for building a decent shed. We put in an offer, which they refused. We said no we can’t go higher, then overnight last Saturday, I thought we should just go for it so we raised the offer to what they’d said was a minimum, and they accepted.
Then after several days of yes/no/yes/no… the bank finally decided that they couldn’t lend us the money until we’d sold the land. So we had to let it go.
This week Daile heard that another, better job that she’d been trying to get for ages, and which she’d ‘fluffed’ at interview by her own admission, obviously didn’t agree, and they’ve offered her that job! She's well chuffed! So am I! (I'm not mentioning either of these orgs in case anyone from the first one happens to see this blog).
After we’d got to no with the bank, we were talking with the ‘personal banker’ that we have about some of the figures that had been bandied about during the process of trying to raise a mortgage on the house. We discovered that contrary to our belief, they ARE prepared to lend us enough money to build a house on our land. Not quite the palace that I’d envisaged from the UK or early in the piece here, but a house non the less.
Daile found a company on the net that build low cost pole homes. They’re cheaper than building from scratch yourself because they make use of prefabricated modular designs. We’ve been looking at these – some are surprisingly good! :
http://w.auwebcentres.com.au/trubuilt/splits_elanora_split.html
and
http://w.auwebcentres.com.au/trubuilt/splits_sunrise_split.html have a look at the pics by clicking on the smaller ones…. They change into the big one.
The fella that does the sales for this company is having a look to see what they would look like on our land in terms of fit… by using the contour map that I modified. We’re beginning to think that this is the way to go, and then add more later as we need it. If we go this way, not only can we afford to build the house after all, but we should be able to build the pool that we promised the kids too!
Here’s hoping.
P.S. Daile decided to go in for a competition to win $350k… just in case it’s a run of luck we’re having!
P.P.S. The bank valued the land at $330! So we were right on the money!
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